After 27 Years, fierce pussy Is Still Making Inescapable Lesbian Art

Last Thursday, Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, and Carrie Yamaoka sat around a table in the lobby of New York City’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, reminiscing about their long history of activism over lunch. As three of the four founding members of fierce pussy, a collective of queer women artists, the group was responsible for bringing a new level of visibility to the role of lesbians in the ACT UP movement and AIDS activism. After finishing lunch, they got back to work wheatpasting an installation over the museum’s ten windows, each an impressive 48 square feet. The installation blows up and remixes posters the group originally distributed and pasted over their nearly three decades of art and advocacy, featuring vintage photographs and reclaiming queer labels like "butch" and slurs like "dyke."

Last year was the first year the Leslie-Lohman Museum utilized its sizable windows, which face Grand Street and Wooster Street — a prime SoHo intersection. Data provided to the museum by the city suggest over 300,000 people cross the intersection every year. “To me, it was important to see what we could do with that power,” says Gonzalo Casals, the museum’s director.

Just after Casals started in his role in April 2017, he commissioned the windows’ first installation: a spiraling SILENCE=DEATH image that paid homage to and was installed by members of The Silence=Death Project that formed in 1985. At the bottom of the 2017 installation was an added line, “Be Vigilant. Refuse. Resist.”

This year’s installation by fierce pussy became a possibility about a year ago, around the same time the SILENCE=DEATH installation went up. Casals says, “They’re both messages that were created illegally in a public space. Now, they’re coming from an institution.”

Ryker Allen

fierce pussy’s work has a firm place in the canon of queer history. “fierce pussy really was fierce in terms of insisting on dyke representation in the public sphere” says Richard Meyer, the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University and co-author of Art & Queer Culture. "They defied lesbian invisibility at a moment when, because of the overrepresentation of AIDS as a gay male disease, it was enforced with particular intensity.”

fierce pussy’s intensity is also reflected in the way they orate their history. From recalling their formation out of ACT UP in the 1990s to the collaborations they did in the 2010s, they reflect with oscillating fondness, sadness, joy, and loss. But whatever they emote, their love and respect for one another is clear. No sole member monopolizes the conversation, or even finishes a story. In fact, they prefer to be quoted only as fierce pussy — not as individuals.

The collective was formed in 1991 after an open call to the women of ACT UP to address lesbian visibility. “Here we were in the trenches fighting alongside everyone, and in a way, there was kind of an invisibility,” they say.

Courtesy of Fierce Pussy

Each meeting resulted in a poster idea that used available resources, like old typewriters and photographs, to bring lesbian identity to the streets. Two of the collective’s founding members printed and Xeroxed the posters at Condé Nast, where they worked. The collective then took to New York neighborhoods to wheatpaste posters while someone kept a lookout, as putting up posters was an illegal activity at the time.

Advertisement

They say the work they did was “quick and dirty,” explaining, “There was such an immediacy from that time, watching your friends and lovers get sick and die in a really short time period. The momentum that we brought to fierce pussy was equally as urgent.”

Their best-known posters are lists of homophobic slurs that end with “AND I AM PROUD,” reclaiming their use. They also used old photographs — often of themselves — to ask viewers to “find the dyke in the picture.” Professor Meyer says the latter successfully addressed “the ways in which the desire of girls is suppressed from the earliest of ages. It’s never too soon, as fierce pussy reminds us, to impose the logic of homophobia.”

Ryker Allen

The installation at Leslie-Lohman utilizes wheatpasted posters from those early days. It’s work they’ve gone back to time and time again, often “remixing” their posters to evolve or reinforce their message.

While the collective has been active since 1991, one of the biggest gaps on their CV is from 1996 to 2008. In 2008, four of the original core members of fierce pussy reconvened for a retrospective at Printed Matter in New York City. They wheatpasted a remix of their original poster onto the storefront window in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. The poster said, “I AM A lezzie, butch, pervert, feminist, amazon, bulldagger, dyke, AND SO ARE YOU.”

Printed Matter’s window prompted outrage from passersby with children. “The cops were called so many times that when the police showed up, they thought our windows had been up for two weeks, when in fact they'd been up for two hours,” says fierce pussy. “In the meantime, across the street there was a Courvoisier ad with two women wrapped around the bottle.”

That experience showed the collective the timeliness of their work. “We realized that list was still really relevant. We also found we really enjoyed the four of us working together again.”

In 2010, they were part of a show at Harvard called ACT UP New York, 1987-1993: Activism Art and the AIDS Crisis. fierce pussy says it was one of the few times much of the ACT UP community was in the same room since the early 1990s, calling it cathartic and upsetting. “We realized how much mourning and sadness was left inside of us. There was not a time to grieve when [the AIDS crisis] was going on.”

Despite the sadness, the experience at Harvard catalyzed them to change their approach. “It's when we really decided to start making work that was more from the now rather than from then,” they say. New work that followed included an installation called Get Up Everybody & Sing at White Columns framed around Sister Sledge’s queer anthem, "We Are Family" and an installation called, “Are you are a boy or girl?” in the gender-neutral bathroom at The LGBT Community Center in New York.

Ryker Allen

Their installation at Leslie-Lohman takes some of the best of then and marries it to the present moment. While the lists and vintage photographs are familiar, they’ve remixed the work to feature new terms and faces that include trans people and more age diversity.

“Things are much more fluid now and there's a huge spectrum of where we all could put ourselves. [The world] is more inclusive that way. That was part of our reasoning for rethinking the list again — that might be something that changes again and again.”

Ultimately, fierce pussy hopes to send the message that, “You are our people. We are your people. We're not trying to educate you or trying to get you to do anything. We're just saying we're here. We're taking this space, we're taking this window.”

Advertisement

During a Trump presidency and through the #MeToo movement, the message is important. "Homogeny and straight culture take up a lot of space. Now we’re saying: 'You’re part of our tribe. What if you're embraced in our community? How does that feel to you?'"

What they don’t hope for is calls to the cops like in 2008. Instead, they’re excited about the prospect of a flurry of Instagram posts, giving their work a virality that wasn’t possible in 1991. Early indicators are promising. “[The corner list poster] is the first thing we put in. We went outside to look at it and there were these three women posing with it. I told them we're fierce pussy and they got so excited.”

If fierce pussy’s installation is able to draw passersby inside, the juxtaposition of walls pasted with queer history to a room full of fresh talent is a reminder that there is much left to do, and there are many who are up for the challenge.

them, a next-generation community platform, chronicles and celebrates the stories, people and voices that are emerging and inspiring all of us, ranging in topics from pop culture and style to politics and news, all through the lens of today’s LGBTQ community.